The FRONTLINE Interviews

Darlene Superville

White House Correspondent, The AP

Darlene Superville is a White House correspondent for The Associated Press. She has covered politics for the AP for more than a decade.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore on Dec. 7, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Pelosi’s Power

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Darlene Superville

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Pelosi, Obama and Bipartisanship

Let's start with the Obama years.[President Barack] Obama comes in, of course, after campaigning on bipartisanship and talking about bridging the gap.Talk a little bit about Obama's point of view of bipartisanship and working with the GOP from Nancy Pelosi's. …

Well, Obama came into office.He had campaigned on unity and bipartisanship and all of that.And I think there was a view among some in Congress, he wasn't a creature of Washington in the way that Nancy Pelosi had been around for decades.And I think there was a view of President Obama that he was perhaps maybe a little bit naïve in that sense, because he had not been around Congress very long; he hadn't served in the Senate for very long, hadn't really been steeped in the way of Washington, whereas, on the other hand, here you have Speaker Pelosi who had been around for many years and had also been in House Democratic leadership for a long time and had been through a lot of legislative battles.And so she knew that after he got into office and after they won the majorities in Congress and they had the votes, this was the time to strike.This was the time to go big and just go and get as much as you can, because Washington operates on a two-year cycle, and you basically have 18 months or so to get things done, which is kind of what President [Joe] Biden is dealing with right now.

And so you strike while the iron is hot.Strike while you have the votes, and get as much as you can.And so there was that bit of a clash between the two of them."Clash" may be a strong word, but difference of opinion on how to approach the president's legislative agenda.

Then Scott Brown wins the election for [Sen. Ted] Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts, and everything changes.There's discussion by Rahm Emanuel and other people in the White House and Congress that we're going to have to go smaller to get this done.And there was a meeting in the White House, and Pelosi was there, and Rahm Emanuel is talking about needing to go smaller to get this done, and her opinion was—and she airs it quite clearly, as she is apt to do—that no, we need to go big, and I will get the votes through the House, and if you want to go small, well, then you can count me out.So talk about that moment in history and the role that she played. …

It was a big moment.

… The day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law at the White House, one of the first people he thanked in his remarks was Speaker Pelosi.And in many respects, there are many people in Washington who believe that the Affordable Care Act would not be law today without her and her insistence, even after the Scott Brown election and Democrats losing the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, she still wanted to go big.She wanted to go for as much as she was able to get.

And you had Rahm Emanuel, who then was advising President Obama, and some others who were a bit chastened by the defeat in Massachusetts.

… They were chastened, wanting to just go smaller, maybe do it piecemeal instead of going for the bigger comprehensive health care bill.But she held firm, and President Obama kind of wanted to go big.There were moments when he talked about going big, but also there seemed to be a little bit of a hesitancy on his part to some degree.

But I think Speaker Pelosi clearly convinced him that, again, they had the votes; she could do it; now was the time to go for it.And eventually they went for it and got the votes, and the Affordable Care Act is not only President Obama's legacy or part of his legacy, but part of Speaker Pelosi's legacy, too.

Pelosi’s Leadership Style

What does that say about her as far as being a leader, as far as her legacy and how she operates?

I think it says that she is just very good at strategizing—strategy, knowing her caucus, knowing where the votes are.And she's always said that she never takes a bill to the floor without knowing that she's going to win.

So she puts in a lot of work beforehand, polling her members, meeting with them one-on-one, taking their temperature, so to speak, negotiating with them, doing a little give-and-take to make sure she has the votes before she goes to the floor.

President Biden said recently that he thinks she is the finest speaker ever in the history of the country, and President Obama has said that about her as well.

So she's very well-regarded for her tenacity, strategy.And just her political instincts have served her well over the years.

And historically, as the first woman speaker, probably the most important woman in American politics, how is she seen by women?What's her reputation as far as pushing forward the election of many other women to Congress?What is her legacy as far as the fact that this is an unbelievably strong woman who came in '87 to a Capitol Hill that was basically a boys' club?What should Americans understand about her?

She's definitely a trailblazer.And you talk about breaking glass ceilings; she's definitely broken through one as far as Congress is concerned.She does reach back and raise lots of money for members of her caucus.She helps them get elected.She's helped young women, women lawmakers get elected.

So all of that will be part of her legacy, aside from the—just the sheer strategic and political instincts that she has, the strategizing that she does to get what she wants when a particular legislation is on the floor.

She's one of a kind right now.And until we get that first woman president of the United States, Nancy Pelosi is a person a lot of women and girls will look up to.

Republicans Campaign Against Pelosi

In 2010 midterms, after health care, after the financial crisis, there were unintended consequences, and the Republicans came at her. They spent $70 million on ads targeting her. They had a bus that was driving around the country, "Dump Nancy Pelosi."

I think it was "Fire Pelosi."Yeah, something like that.

Why does she become such a target? …

She has said that part of the reason, or maybe perhaps the biggest reason that Republicans went after her and made her such a target is that she's effective.And she's shown that again and again with passing legislation, getting it passed when most people think that it doesn't have a snowball's chance of getting through the House.So there's that element of it.

Republicans also like to paint her as some kind of crazy, liberal, "loony left" person, all-the-way-over-on-the-left radical.And I guess it's easy to do because she comes from San Francisco, which is one of the most liberal places in the United States.But she's also fine with being villainized in this way because in the same way that it helps the Republicans and conservatives raise money, it also helps Speaker Pelosi raise money for her members and for the House candidates who want to—who want to end up in Congress.

So it kind of works both ways, and she's fine with it.

It's fascinating she raises more money for both sides than anybody else.

Absolutely.

The end result is they lose the House majority, the speakership, and she's out in the hinterland for a few years until 2018.Does she get blamed for that?How does her caucus react?Why does she stay in the leadership position?

She did get some blame for it, and it's because of the Affordable Care Act.You had the beginning of the Tea Party and all of this opposition to the health care law, the mandate that had been passed.And so there was significant pushback after that became law, even though she saw that as part of her legacy; President Obama saw it as part of his legacy.So there was that blowback for her.

And there were also some members of the House Democratic Caucus who I think thought at the time that she had been in leadership for quite a while.She led them to defeat by not going smaller on health care.She wanted to go bigger.And there started to be some grumbling, which has continued over the years, that it's time for new leadership, time for somebody new to lead the House Democrats.

And so she became a victim of some of that unrest and unhappiness over House Democrats losing the majority.It's not fun being in the minority in the House.And so that's where a lot of that came from.

… What makes somebody like that tick, to think she deserves this position?It's not ego.In some other people, you might expect it.It seems like fulfilling an obligation or something.A lot of people have different points of view about that.What's your take on what it takes to be like that?

I think some of it is her background, being the daughter and sister of mayors of Baltimore; having grown up in a political family with this strong sense of public service.And so that's one of the things I think that drives her a lot.And also this sense of serving just people, the American people, which is part of her Catholic upbringing.So there are those two forces at work.

And then I think the third thing is that, in all the times in recent years that she's been challenged, there really has been no one else that quite measured up to Speaker Pelosi, who could come in, take over, organize the way that she has been able to all those years, raise the gobs of money that she's been able to raise over the years, and just effectively unite the caucus, hold the caucus together and deliver votes when needed.

So all those things together, I think, have worked in her favor.

Pelosi and Trump

[Donald] Trump is elected.There's a meeting with leadership at the White House.Everybody expected a nicey-nice meeting and relationships get started.At one point the president leans forward and says, "I won the popular vote, and it's only because those votes were stolen by illegal immigrants voting, and that's not even mentioning California."And she took umbrage to this.And even though she was in the minority and according to the rules of the game was not supposed to speak up, she said—no one else understood that in the room because she was the only one that had been around long enough, and second because she felt she need to correct him and say, "No, Mr. President, that is not the case.Those are not the correct facts."And [she] stood up to him immediately.What do you take from that story? …

In that moment, I think Speaker Pelosi saw and/or realized that President Trump was someone who was not going to play with facts, right?When he asserted that he won the popular vote, everyone in that room knew that he wasn't speaking the truth, right?He lost the popular vote; he won in the Electoral College.

So in that moment, I think she realized that this is somebody who was not going to play with the facts.He was going to be loosey-goosey, perhaps, with the truth.And I think also she talked a lot during the Trump years about how much she respected the office of the presidency, and I think that level of respect that she's had for the office of the presidency and/or the occupant—we can argue about whether or not she actually respected President Trump or not—but that seems to be a moment where she probably realized that this was going to be a different ballgame in terms of her relationship with the president of the United States and things would have to be done differently.

How differently?

She would have to be one of the ones to call him out whenever he said something that was not true, as she did in that meeting and at other times, as we saw over the four years that he was in office.

Because, of all the men in that room, she was the only one who stood up.

She was the only that stood up.

In the 2018 midterm elections, she has a strategy of telling her caucus to ignore Trump, to not attack Trump, but to talk about the positive things that the Democrats had done and things they would do.She was also supportive of all her members, even ones that were in conservative districts, some that were saying they would never vote for her to be speaker again.But she would raise money for them.She was all about the votes.Describe the midterms and what it says about Nancy Pelosi and her strategies and what she's all about.

Right.So she is not speaker, but wanted obviously to become speaker again, to have—for Democrats to have the majority in the House again.So that would have been the driving factor for her in those midterm elections.And as we saw before with the Republicans and spending all that money on ads against her in the previous election cycle, she was more than happy to allow anyone to make her the villain if the final result was that she would win, the Democratic candidate would win, House Democrats would win back the majority or retain the majority, depending on the circumstances in the election.

So that was all part of her strategy for winning back the House.

Division in the Democratic Party

Once she's running for speakership again, there's a group of moderates that decide it's time for new blood.What does that say about the caucus at that point?And what does it say about the fact that despite this attack on her, she becomes speaker again?

She knew she had the votes, and that goes back to just her shrewd political mind, her political instincts and her ability to work her caucus to get what she wants.And in this case, she wanted to become speaker again.And it's also another one of those situations where, at that moment in time, even though there are all these moderate members who wanted to challenge her or thought it was time for new blood or new leadership, there really wasn't anyone else able to kind of step up to the plate and take over in the way that she had led the caucus previously as speaker.

So in some ways, that made it—I don't want to say made it easier for her to triumph and to become speaker again, but she certainly had an advantage over any of the potential challengers who would have stepped up and wanted to run against her, or did run against her at that time.

If there was any question in people's mind about how strong and important she was in opposing the Trump administration, there's the Dec. 11, 2018, meeting, where the president allows the press to stay and at some point he says, "Nancy's in a weakened position here," … and she says something like, "Mr. President, do not underestimate the power that I bring for my caucus."

The president is put in his place somewhat.

… Talk about that meeting, what that says about that relationship between her and Trump, and what it means for her reputation.

That was such a fascinating meeting, because normally the American public would never see the four leaders of Congress and the president negotiating and hashing things out the way they were.And normally what happens is the meeting is scheduled, they come over, they go into the Oval Office.There's what's called a pool spray, which means the press corps, the White House press corps, a small group of us, are allowed into the Oval Office for a few minutes to take photographs, shoot some film, TV; we'll have a little bit of film of them all sitting around.And then we're supposed to be shown the door after a couple of minutes, and then they go about their business.

But you had President Trump, who came into office talking a lot about his negotiating skills, and the thinking in his mind seemed to be that "Hey, I'm this great negotiator; let's keep the press in the room and, you know, show some of this negotiating back and forth."

And it ended up turning out to be a situation where he basically had his hat handed to him by Speaker Pelosi.And so all of America that was tuning in at that very moment was able to see that.

And so when she—the meeting was over and she put on what happened to be her red coat that day and walked out of the West Wing to what are known as "the sticks," which is where lawmakers who come to the White House often will come after their meetings. It just became this meme, this few minutes, seconds, of video that was replayed on Twitter and on the evening news.

And it kind of did really cement her reputation as someone who could go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump. And again, in many instances throughout Speaker Pelosi's career, often [she] had been the only woman in the room.So she was again the only woman in the room, and all of America got to see her hold her own against—against President Trump.

And so it just became this fascinating moment.This meme … when you think of Pelosi and when some people think of the speaker, they will think of that moment and of her marching out in the red coat, with the sunglasses after she just slayed the president, so to speak.

Talk about the divide in the Democratic Caucus once she gets the speaker role again.… Talk about the divide between progressives and moderates and how she's trying to hold them all together by some of her positions, like on impeachment.It's a harder thing to do to hold the caucus together.

So not only did she think impeaching President Trump would be bad for her members, she really believed that it would be bad for the country at that moment in time.And that seemed to be the overarching concern, because she kept saying that it would be divisive.And in order to impeach a president, she believed that it needed to be bipartisan; you need to have Republicans on board along with Democrats.

And so it was fine that you have Democratic moderates and Democratic progressives that wanted to go after Trump and basically kick him out of office, but at the same time you also needed to have some Republicans buy in to that idea, and she didn't have that in the House.And so she held off there obviously as long as she could, until the reports about the phone call that President Trump had with the president of Ukraine.But the push and pull that she had with a lot of the more progressive members of her caucus, a lot of them were younger; they came from more I guess you would say liberal areas of the country, liberal districts.They had different ideas about how to do things in the House.They wanted more bold action on some things, whereas Pelosi and Congressman [Steny] Hoyer and Congressman [Jim] Clyburn, they were seen as more of the old guard, more traditional, not on board with some of the new ways of doing things that the new members wanted.

And so that's where you saw a lot of clashing and a lot of dissent, so to speak, among Democrats in the—right after Trump was elected, right after the House Democrats won back the House.And she, again, you know, worked like she always does to try to keep the caucus together on whatever vote was coming, whatever significant vote was coming up.

Pelosi and the Squad

Some of the progressives, including the Squad, had come in in 2018 and had some very strong opinions about needing to move the Democratic Party further along the progressive path.How did they view Pelosi, do you believe, from what you know?

They, I think they saw her as someone from a different era, right?And she was already at this point in her late 70s.Many of them were late 20s or 30s; I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez was the youngest person at that time ever elected to Congress.So there was just this vast difference in the way that the folks on the left, on the far left wanted to do things versus the way Speaker Pelosi would do things.

Speaker Pelosi was more of a tactician, more of a negotiator, whereas they just wanted to go for it.They didn't really seem all that interested in bipartisanship.And there were times when Speaker Pelosi also didn't really go the bipartisan route, right?Take the Affordable Care Act as an example.But her approach this time around seemed to be different, and the progressives were not entirely on board with going that way.

And so there you had the clash.

Another issue is how each side saw power.They got into a spat when she had a conversation with Maureen Dowd about her views on the Squad and how they didn't understand what power was.They thought influence by having 5 million Twitter fans meant that they could move the people that they talked to over Twitter and that would move the country, while Nancy Pelosi believed that power was the ability to move the Congress, to get the votes in Congress to move legislation that would change the government and the country. …

Talk about the differences between the two sides—in the early days; they come together more later on—about the understanding of what power is.

Right.There was this, you can call it a complete difference of opinion about power and how to use it and how to get it.And so you had members like the Squad members and other progressives who just wanted to come in and boom, boom, boom, just kind of ramrod their way through Congress in terms of trying to get what they wanted.

I remember climate being an issue.There was some, I believe, social services, social welfare legislation or things like that that they really wanted.

But you have Pelosi on the other side, who, again, has been around much longer than many of these new members have been alive and is accustomed to—you can call it old school if you like—but she's accustomed to her way of getting legislation through the House, which is building consensus, building unity, knowing where her members are, reaching out to them, and just not kind of bulldozing your way through Congress.

So that was where a lot of difference of opinion—you saw that between the two different groups.

One of the things that brought the two sides together was when Donald Trump made some comments about the Squad that were racist.What did that do to this debate within the caucus, and how ironic was it that the president once again was the one that helped the Democrats become more unified?

It's funny.President Trump would always say that he—the one thing that he admired Democrats for was their unity, right?They voted together all the time, and he contributed to that in many ways.He had criticized the Squad in a tweet, calling on them to go back to the countries they came from.And three of the four members of the Squad were born in the United States, and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, she was born overseas and had become—had come here as a child and was a naturalized citizen.And he just, like, didn't realize that, didn't know it, didn't care to find out before he fired off this tweet, which was targeted at these four women of color in the House of Representatives.

And so that rallied a lot of members around the Squad.They came to the Squad's defense.Speaker Pelosi came to their defense.And the House ended up voting on a measure to censure the president for what he had said, which was the first time in, I think, 100 years that a vote like that had been taken against a president of the United States.

So he had a very, very unifying effect on Democrats.

The 2020 State of the Union Address

Let's talk about the 2020 State of the Union.So they do impeach.The Senate takes it on and is close to making a decision, but it's apparent they're not going to convict.He comes to the State of the Union and is feeling vindicated.He rants and raves and says quite a few lies or misstatements throughout the speech.He gives Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom, somebody who has been attacking Nancy Pelosi for decades, saying awful, horrible things, and Nancy's behind the president listening to all of this, going through the speech and making little tears in it to show every time she thinks this is a lie or something so that she could refer back to it later on because she doesn't have a pen.

And then, of course, there's that famous moment at the end where she stands up while the president is getting applause and she starts tearing up the speech.Talk a little bit about that moment, what it says about her and the motivations.When you were watching that, what were your thoughts?

I thought it was one of the rare moments where Speaker Pelosi kind of let her emotions get the best of her.There are times when, particularly when she does her weekly press conference on the Hill, where you see flashes of annoyance at a reporter's question or annoyance at something that someone has said.And in those Trump years, there were quite a few moments like that where she would be asked something, a question about something Trump had tweeted or said or had done.

But in that moment when she stood after the speech was over and started literally tearing up the speech on national television, it struck me as one of those moments where she did let President Trump get under her skin and she let her emotions get the best of her.

I'd never seen anything like that before.No one in Washington had ever seen anything like that before.And she got some criticism for it afterward from some members of her caucus, as well as commentators and people like that on television.

But as she is wont to do, she said she didn't regret it.

She felt that it was full of lies and—

She felt that he was tearing up the truth, and therefore she thought, well, I'll tear up his speech.And so she did.

Pelosi and Biden

… It's been reported that during the campaign, she was consulting with the to-be-president throughout saying, "If you win this election, you've got to go big and fast."

What from her past, from ACA to whatever, led her to the understanding that this was the direction to go and the ways they could accomplish some almost impossible tasks with the numbers they had to change America?And what did it lead her to do?

I think what she learned you can extrapolate from the lessons of the Affordable Care Act and passing that through the House.That was a moment in time that is probably comparable to the moment in time in President Biden's first year in office.Democrats have the majorities in both houses.They're slim.

Washington operates on a two-year cycle, an 18-month, little bit less than that.So she knows or knew and realized or recognized that the window was short to get these things done.

She now has a Democratic president in office, or about to take office, someone who shares her view that these are things that need to be done.She's always been very into climate, climate change.That also has been an issue that President Biden talked about during the campaign.

As the coronavirus pandemic set in and the economy got a little wobbly, he also realized that money needed to be spent, not only on vaccines but on other things, to kind of help the economy come roaring back.She had just survived—well, not just, but she had lived through the 2008 financial crisis so she knew the importance there, again, of bolstering the economy and trying to get to turn it around again.

So I think in the moment with President Biden, she's drawing on lessons from the past, again mixed in with a lot of the—just the political instincts and smarts that she has, that she was born with and that she also developed over her career in Congress.

And so all of those things coming together at the right moment in time, that's what—that's what you take—that's what she takes away from it.

And so the moment is now to push, because next year, who knows what the Senate will look like, right?There's a very strong chance that Democrats will not have the majority after the 2022 midterms.And so you just have to go for it, and go for it now.And that's—I think that's what she learned from the Affordable Care Act, the lesson that he's applying to today.

Pelosi’s Legacy

And the legacy she leaves behind?Will we ever see another legislator like Nancy Pelosi?

That's a very good question, and it's hard to say.Right now, you have Congressman McCarthy, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is very much angling to be the next speaker.But would he be like Speaker Pelosi?I don't know.

So there are all these things that are happening on the Republican side, and Kevin McCarthy, who is the leader of House Republicans, who wants to be the speaker of the entire House, has not stood up in any kind of public way and said, "This is wrong; don't do this; this behavior is unbecoming of a member of Congress," whereas she's willing to do that and has done that and has said those things.

Again, you have President Biden who said she is one of the finest or the finest speaker ever in the history of the country.That means that he thinks that she's, you know, better than your Tip O'Neills or some of those legendary figures who come before her.

So it's hard to say.I think I want to say quality or just the fiber of members of Congress who are coming up now just seems to be a lot different than members we had 20, 30 years ago.So it's hard to say whether we'll ever see anybody else in the mold of Speaker Pelosi.

You might if there is ever another woman speaker because she will have set the example for women who come after her.But in terms of a male, I don't know.It's really hard to say.

And some of that may also be—at the risk of sounding sexist—she's a mother and a grandmother.She often talks about recognizing childish behavior when she sees it.And in many ways, you can draw the analogy that being speaker of the House is like being a mother because you're constantly trying to negotiate battles between your kids and that sort of thing.

So maybe the fact that she is a woman has contributed something to her being the kind of speaker that she's become.

… The passing of the Biden agenda and her success in the House of getting these things through, even though there was just a small majority, what were the stakes for her?What were the stakes for the Democrats if they had failed?

If they had failed, they wouldn't have—they wouldn't have anything, or they'd have precious little to take into the '22 midterm elections, right?President Biden campaigned on infrastructure, Build Back Better and other issues.And criminal justice reform, something he talked about, hasn't gone anywhere.Preserving voting rights, he talked about that; that hasn't gone anywhere.

So they were kind of coming up on empty, and you have to have something to take to voters to give them a reason to send you back.

And for her?If she does retire, this is her final farewell basically.These are all issues she's been talking about.Child care issues, issues for parents were things she had worked for many, many years for.What would the consequences have been for her if they weren't able to put through the Build Back Better and infrastructure and so forth?

I think for somebody who is contemplating retirement, you do want to go out on a high note, if you can.And so getting that legislation through for Speaker Pelosi would allow her to end her career on a high note, helping this new Democratic president get his agenda through Congress.

But I also think that in some respects, while it would be nice for her to get all these things through and see them signed into law and enacted, she has done so much already that it may not necessarily be the—the end-all, if you will, if she doesn't get it through.I mean, she's got—helped with the Affordable Care Act, and that's huge.And she still is trying to work with the president to improve that legislation even still today.

Her role in the financial crisis in '08, her opposition to the Iraq War—there are so many other things that are part of her legacy that, while being able to add the Biden agenda to that would be nice, I don't think she would go back to San Francisco and be crying over spilled milk or unpassed legislation if it were not to happen.

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